ock, and this morning
she was even later, for she had dressed with unusual care. She put
on, however, only a tight-fitting black dress, which people thereabouts
thought very plain. She was a tall, dark woman of thirty, with a rather
sallow complexion and a touch of dull salmon red in her cheeks, where
the blood seemed to burn under her brown skin. Her hair, parted evenly
above her low forehead, was so black that there were distinctly blue
lights in it. Her black eyebrows were delicate half-moons and her lashes
were long and heavy. Her eyes slanted a little, as if she had a strain
of Tartar or gypsy blood, and were sometimes full of fiery determination
and sometimes dull and opaque. Her expression was never altogether
amiable; was often, indeed, distinctly sullen, or, when she was
animated, sarcastic. She was most attractive in profile, for then one
saw to advantage her small, well-shaped head and delicate ears, and felt
at once that here was a very positive, if not an altogether pleasing,
personality.

The entire management of Mrs. Olaf's household devolved upon her aunt,
Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting woman of fifty. When Clara
was a little girl her mother died, and Johanna's life had been spent
in ungrudging service to her niece. Clara, like many self-willed and
discontented persons, was really very apt, without knowing it, to do
as other people told her, and to let her destiny be decided for her
by intelligences much below her own. It was her Aunt Johanna who had
humoured and spoiled her in her girlhood, who had got her off to Chicago
to study piano, and who had finally persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson
as the best match she would be likely to make in that part of the
country. Johanna Vavrika had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old
country. She was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental.
She was so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her
brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored her niece
because of her talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but
most of all because of her selfishness.

Clara's marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna's particular triumph. She
was inordinately proud of Olaf's position, and she found a sufficiently
exciting career in managing Clara's house, in keeping it above the
criticism of the Ericsons, in pampering Olaf to keep him from finding
fault with his wife, and in concealing from every one Clara's domestic
inf